The following is a guest blog post by Brian Benz, Senior Technical Evangelist at Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

Since the previous release of production-ready MongoLab plans on Azure, we’ve seen demand increase significantly. The MongoLab and Microsoft teams have been working together to develop a solution for your growing requirements and are excited to announce the arrival of our newest high-memory MongoDB database plans, with virtual machine choices that now provide up to 56GB of RAM per node with availability in all eight Azure datacenters worldwide.

Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of the Cloud and Enterprise group in Microsoft says, “We have been working with MongoLab for a long time to bring a fully-managed Database-as-a-Service offering for MongoDB to Azure. With full production support for all VM types across all datacenters, we are excited and optimistic for the future of MongoDB on our cloud platform and think there is no better place to run your application in the cloud than Azure.”

Highlights of MongoLab’s Dedicated Cluster plans on Azure

Highly-Available MongoDB Cloud Hosting

Dedicated virtual machines (up to 56GB of RAM)

Multi-zone automatic failover using MongoDB Replica Sets

MongoDB Management Tools

Free daily system-level backup or custom backups with easy restore

Real-time and historical monitoring of key performance metrics

Automated query analysis and index recommendations

MongoDB Support

Expert, timely email support as well as a 24×7 emergency support hotline

Availability SLA

Commercial Support from MongoDB, Inc. with one-hour SLA

Getting Started

Try it out on MongoLab.com

Head over to our Azure page, click “Get Started Now” and select which plan and datacenter you’d like to provision your new MongoDB. Once ready, MongoLab will provide a connection string you can plug into your application.

Alternatively, you can login to your MongoLab account and clone any existing Sandbox database (from Azure or any other cloud provider) to upgrade an existing database to a new Replica Set plan.

New to MongoDB?

We have plenty of resources to help!

Visit the Microsoft Open Tech blog to see all the options available to MongoLab developers on Azure and in-depth instructions on getting started.

MongoLab’s open-source site www.mongolab.org has many resources to get you up and running with MongoDB quickly. For resources specific to beginners, the Basics page will be very helpful.

For specific tutorials on deploying to Azure and MongoLab, we have some great examples on the Azure Documentation Center:

What’s next?

We’re excited about our ongoing partnership and look forward to helping Azure users scale their production MongoDB deployments. Stay tuned for more announcements soon and feel free to write to MongoLab’s team at support@mongolab.com with questions any time.